Some New Years Resolutions For 2013

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I’m pretty sure only one item on this list counts as a resolution. They aren’t life-changing in any way. Most of them are just small tasks that, for one reason or another, never make it to the top of my to-do list.

Generate new personal crypto keys

My GPG key was created on March 26, 2005. It should have expired a long time ago, but I never set an expiration date. The ssh key I use isn’t much newer than that… I should have done this a very, very long time ago.

This time around, I plan to put a reasonable expiration date on the GPG key!

Rework my persist system

My shell environment clean up ended up hitting a bit of a road block. When I built my little persist system to version my configuration files, I did it there, right in place. I manually created the git repository that persist stores my configuration files in, and I manually integrated that into my Prezto directory structure.

I haven’t had the gumption to tear that all back out and build some sort of installer script for persist. This is not only holding back my clean-up progress, it is also preventing me from writing more about it!

Continue working on zsh-dwim

I am still pretty excited about zsh-dwim and I most definitely plan to keep adding new features to it. A recent post on Reddit has inspired me a bit, but I haven’t quite figured out how, or even if, this fits into zsh-dwim.

Build a web interface for the arcade cabinet

This plan doesn’t have a lot of depth at the moment. Two things happened at about the same time that planted the seed for this idea. My friend Brian gave me a couple of his spare NFC tags right around the time that I was setting up my arcade table’s external monitor.

While configuring games to output correctly to the second monitor, I realized that the arcade cabinet is rapidly running out of “extra” buttons to use. I wanted a simple and intuitive way to switch some games between two player, mirrored cocktail mode and a single player mode using the external display.

I’m thinking that I can add some NFC tags and QR codes to the arcade cabinet that would point you directly to the arcade cabinet’s web interface. This way, anyone could use his phone or tablet to control the display or to kill a misbehaving game.

Buy fewer games for my arcade cabinet, spend more time playing them instead

Not long after completing my arcade cabinet, I learned that playing new arcade-style indie games are much more interesting than replaying old, emulated arcade and console games. I decided to set a goal of buying one game for the arcade cabinet every month.

That was over two years ago, and in that time I’m certain I’ve bought more than two dozen games. More than half of the Humble Bundles have included a platformer. I’ve bought a few of the Indie Royale bundles, but some of the games that looked interesting in these bundles just don’t work on Linux under Wine. More recently, I’ve had some luck with IndieGameStand.

Early on, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to meet this goal. Today, I just have too many games to play. I spend too much time installing new games that I never get around to playing and not enough time playing the games I already have.

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